A Red-Letter Day for the Family

Awake at 5 AM I checked Facebook to find that relatives in Ohio (in an hour earlier time zone) were up also and thinking about the events that might happen today. Being a Saturday, one does not want to waste time by sleeping in too long. So up I was!

The weather readers are calling for afternoon showers and thunderstorms, some possibly severe, but scattered. I did not know if that were a meteorologist's sense of humor...scattered being the operative word for what happens  when severe weather, read tornadoes, hit this area. Homes, cars, livestock...all scattered.

But I digress and want to quickly return to why this day will be a red-letter day for our family.

Today is college graduation day for oldest granddaughter Brittany Elizabeth. With her social work degree in hand from the University of Southern Indiana she will be ready to take on the ills of the world. I think the world will be in pretty capable hands.

Here she is in 2001, practicing for this very day. Congratulations Brittany. We could not be prouder of you.

Progress

Here's what gets me!

First, Facebook changes everything around; then Blogspot changes everything around.

Why can't there be a button to push when you just want everything to stay as it was? As it was when you last figured it out? As it was when you purposed to put the time and energy into setting up your pages? If people what something newer, flashier, better,...whatever, why do I have to go along?

Can you tell that I have just had difficulty getting into this blank posting site? And it looks nothing like the site I typed on last week. It looks bare. Sterile! Unfriendly!

Oh well, progress continues whether or not I'm on board with it.

Like the new and improved dish washing soap. Since the girls grew up and left home we have had an automatic dishwasher (not to be confused with the two of them who did the dishes when they lived at home). I have been satisfied with some brand of liquid soap which yes, did leave marks on the glasses and the silver, but otherwise, did the job of washing the stuck-on food down the drain. My husband came home from the store one day with a bag of new-fangled dish soaps. In little plastic bags, the soap formed a little cake of pressed together soap. My husband claimed that putting soap in the dishwasher would be so much simpler with this product, and so it was. That freed up 8 more seconds of retirement time to enjoy. Hurrah!  (and at only 1/3 more the price!)

On another note: we have just stayed the weekend in a hotel which charged an exorbitant rate because it was near an international airport and thus, a major city.  I did not mind the cost as much as I minded the waste baskets that were in the room. Leather, they had inserts that divided the baskets into two clearly marked parts: one part for trash, the other for recyclables. A separate sign in the bathroom indicated that in order to save the earth I could opt to use the towels again by simply hanging them up. If they were on the floor they would be replaced. Was it less than five years ago that hotel sheets were not changed everyday?

Please don't think I am against saving the earth, against the 'greening' of the country or something like that. I am all for that. And as soon as that hotel chain lowers its prices, I'll join the parade to recycle and reuse. Until then they can hire a trash separator.It won't be me.

And that's what I think about it.

Anniversary

Forty years with the same man....or 40 years with the same woman, depending upon who's doing the writing.

It seems like a lifetime.And in many ways it has been a lifetime.

I recently posted the life lessons I had learned in each decade of my life. I think I can post four things I've learned for each decade of this marriage.

The first decade I learned that just because one circles things in catalogs, leaves them on his pillow and puts coupons for them inside, one is still likely to get a collapsible laundry cart on wheels for Christmas that sits under the clothes chute in the basement.

The second decade I learned that if you say something like, "As soon as you get out of law school, I'm enrolling in a degree program," you'd best be ready to put up or shut up.

The third decade I learned that when children leave home, some of them stay gone...and take grand children with them. Despite what I read for the statistics, some kids, both of ours in fact, really never come home after college and that sometime one must launch a search to find out where they have gone and then one has to quit high-paying, corporate jobs to move closer to them. Most of that last 'learning' was facetious...especially the 'high-paying' part.

This last decade I have learned the most.  I learned that most things I thought were important, in fact, were not. Right now I would give much for a collapsible laundry cart on wheels...because it would mean that I have a basement, and yes, I am writing this sitting in Tornado Alley during tornado season. Boo!

Happy Anniversary Honey.

Pet Peeves

-The neighbor's cat who sits on my window sill watching my bird feeder and bullying my birds. This was the same cat that found and ate the vole in the middle of the backyard. I liked the cat that day.

-Mail delivery when only catalogs and requests for money arrive (and I don't mean bills). I continue to receive a bi-monthly magazine renewal form from a magazine we sent to a grand daughter when she was four. She's 24 now.

-News programs that attempt to tease you with the partial headlines of a breaking story. Someday they will figure out that SmartPhones can find most news reports and save their owner any anxiety to wait for the 6:00 o'clock news to find out if a tornado is barreling down on the town .

-Car dealers who yell at me during their TV commercials.

-Cookies with calories.

-Vanna White in the color pink.

-Not knowing how to lower my friend count of Facebook.

-Kate Turabian on general principle.

-Forwarded emails and posts on Facebook that tell me what to do or 1) I will have bad luck, or 2) it will prove that I am not a true fan of someone or something.

-Food service people who handle food and money without gloves or washing their hands.

-Wondering which employees need to have a written reminder that "All employees must wash their hands before returning to work."

-Spring Break beach pictures all over the Internet while I sit here in southern Indiana.

-Cadbury Egg Ice Cream that can only be purchased in Australia.

-Pet Peeve lists that go on and on....and on.

And that's what I think about it.